Northern Exposure

“All summer long, anywhere we’d go, people would just refer to us as ‘Canada’ instead of our names,” says 26-year-old sculptor and jewelry designer Rochelle Goldberg of her circle of young, Canadian artist friends living in New York. “It got me thinking about our community—our group of friends and how we relate to our work.” The result of this consideration is an exhibition titled “160km,” which presents works by 10 emerging Canadian artists and will open tomorrow evening at Kidd Yellin gallery in Red Hook. The artists-Aaron Aujila, Robin Cameron, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Matt Creed, Dylan Eastgaard, Lukas Geronimas, Ryan Foerster, Shawn Kuruneru, Ben Shumacher and Goldberg-come from Vancouver and Toronto, Alberta and Calgery. They’re all in their mid-late twenties, and the works exhibited range from a series of three highly distorted black and white close-up photos of “friends in basements” by filmmaker and photographer Creed to Goldberg’s towering, aluminum-plated sculptures. Robin Cameron’s rainbow-colored, abstract pastel drawing (“It’s muted and there’s something caved about the marks,”) a 9-foot-tall, wooden column with a stainless steel track running down its center (“a futuristic element,” comments artist Elaine Cameron-Weir,) and Ryan Foerster’s From a Small Town in South Ontario, a panty hose-encased, marble-patterned plaster sink (“ripped from a sublet in Harlem,” the artist offers.) “The fact that we’re Canadian is not meant to be apparent in the work,” explains Cameron-Weir. “But it is what brought us together.”